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The Pier Falls

2017/09/28 14:25:30瀏覽900｜回應0｜推薦8

Writer:

Haddon was born on 26 September 1962 in Northampton, England. He was educated at Uppingham School and Merton College, Oxford, where he studied English. Haddon is a vegetarian and enjoys vegetarian cookery. He describes himself as a "hard-line atheist. His short story, "The Pier Falls", was longlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the richest prize in the world for a single short story. Haddon resides in Oxford with his wife Sos Eltis, a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, and their two young sons.

Story:

It’s a bloodcurdling story. The piers fall down to eight incidents, you never know which will shatter our life, What the stories have in common is a struggle for survival. There is a particularly disturbing but not implausible:

1.The pier fell, fifty-eight dead in five minutes, ten years after the disaster the pier is brought down in a series of controlled explosions and over many months the remnants are lifted laboriously. No other human remains are found.

2. The Island: The Island is the story of a princess who embraced the lover who killed her father , mother and monster brother and at the end torture her to death on a barren island. Her mother had been raped by a bull and had given birth to a monster who lay chained and snarling in the nest of straw and dung at the center of a maze beneath the palace. So the princess has a monster brother.(p.27)

3.Bunny: He enjoy gourmet and lustful life. He got choked on a fork of chicken.

4. “Wodwo” starts from a family gathers for Christmas in a snowy English town. With traditional and domestic atmosphere ends up with a stranger with a gun appears outside the family’s house. Gavin chose not to listen to his father’s advice. It brings Gavin into trouble. Gavin shut the stranger by accidence. And the stranger left with a curse that he will let him pay back for his rudeness!” This drives Gavin into the life of hell with suicide and incest life. At the end, the stranger gives him a “lucky” lesson, just break his index finger as a lesson and drives him home.

5. "The Gun," a man's life is marked by a single afternoon and a rusty.

“The Gun” in which small-town, post-industrial England butts up against its more rural past. In the first, two boys stray to the edge of their estate and into some woods – “The bubbling runs of a blackbird’s call. An empty pack of pork scratchings trodden into cracked and powdery earth” – in an ill-conceived adventure that ends with a deer being butchered on the top floor of a council tower-block. The most powerful story in the collection, “The Gun,” is an exploration of how one afternoon’s encounter with the frightening capability of a pistol brought irrevocable change to one boy’s life. Haddon builds a tremendous empathy for the boy through the character’s awareness of being cleaved apart from his old self. That which has been scraped away becomes “a firestorm of ghost lives speeding away into the dark.”

10-year-old Daniel and his playmate Sean shared a secret to go to the woods to try Sean’s gun. They frighten Robert away, and kill a deer. After forty years. Daniel met Robert at Sean’s mother’s funeral. “Who are you “ asked Robert. Daniel hard to face who he was.

6.The Woodpecker And The Wolf: The story is about volunteer “sofanauts” Clare who pursue after the fantasies of being at sea with Magellan or Frobisher, flew to Mars. In the final second the touchdown rockets go off under the capsule to soften the landing. Again she thins she has hit the ground. Then they hit the ground. She blacks out(p.216): “People willing to be fired into space on top of a 700-tonne firework.” The ghastly description of an operation to remove an appendix in space shows there are no limits to Haddon’s gravity-defying imagination.

“A colonist on a remote planet contends with a string of grisly hazards – botched appendectomies, suicide by her colleagues, the abandonment of relief efforts, an unexpected pregnancy – before being rescued. As she returns with her child to a spookily idyllic Earth”

7.Breath: a woman on the run from a relationship gone wrong returns from the US:

For a woman, life is a plastic face, terrorists and paedophiles (p.238), she ends up all the relationship with the fire, she feel the wood above his head is ablaze and the flames are running like excited children outwards and upwards through all the airways in the great wooden maze(p.260). “The train clatters north from Euston. The deep chime of the familiar. Chained dogs in scrapyards, level crossings, countryside like a postcard, all her history lessons written on the landscape, Maundy money and ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’.”

8.The Boys Who Left Home to Learn Fear: It uses a setting out of H P Lovecraft or Edgar Rice Burroughs to tell its own loss and abandonment in the jungle(p.265). Edgar shoot Nicolas for a better swift death. The entire expedition was in search of Carlysle and the rest of his party. Arthur and Edgar press ahead, after 4 hours, not return. So he and Bill had gone to the cave to look for Edgar and Arthur(p.286) He and Bill already found 6 graves, but is left calf got swollen and contaminated. He is in a coma. “I expected my fear to increase but this did not happen. On the contrary, I became very calm. My fear of earlier melted away and I felt completely safe. I possessed no body and existed at not point in space, and if one is both nothing and nowhere how can one be attacked?”

9.The Weir: a depressed man who saves Kelly from drowning and who subsequently, in her own ways, saves himself. He saves a drowning woman who resist him to call ambulance. Since Kelly feels better, she runs out of the house. His separate wife stops by to get her belongings. His son Timothy also back cos the house fire.(p.319).

Later Kelly comes back to get her clothes while she went drowning. This time, Kelly comes in good time to cheer him up while his two dogs, Leo and Fran are dead. Nothing is wasted and the river will keep on flowing and there will be dandelions in spring and the buzzard will still be circling above the wasteland(p.321)

Highlights vs self- reflection:

1. P.127“If someone snaps your olive branch ,then you are surely allowed to poke them with the broken end.” An eye for an eye will make your both eyes blind. A smooth mood is a better pill to cure all wound.

2. P.234” Your mother and your sister believe the world’s problems could be solved if people were polite to on another” To be kind to others are important, but we need to make sure are we in the dangerous situation. We got to help ourselves first. Then we will have the energy to help others.

3. P.18”The kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind.” We are doomed to be born. Haddon is a hard-line atheist. Which make his story turn into helpless doomed creature

Golden Sentence:

1.P.267” I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my tongue. I will keep my mouth as it were with a cradle: while the ungodly is in my sight…”

2.p.268”The entire expedition was for him simply an arena in which he might try his courage and strength to their limits, and the greater our difficulties the more he relished them.”

3.p.279”The sky so clear and dark that I was able to discern the colours of individual stars, each one burning with the light of a different spectrum according to the peculiar combination of elements which fuelled its monstrous furnace.”

4. p.321)”Nothing is wasted and the river will keep on flowing and there will be dandelions in spring and the buzzard will still be circling above the wasteland.”

Conclusion:

1. “The Pier Falls” is the consumption of all the sadness ,loneliness, isolation, betrayed and abandoned. It booms to make the story so helpless moving.

2. “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and has become a dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean and hated bird! ³For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich through the abundance of her luxury.” The Pier Falls, the vampire come who will control our soul. Haddon is a hard-line atheist, push the story up to nowhere dead end.

3. As Robyn, a character in Breathe, puts it: “You can’t just decide how you want things to be, Carol. That’s not how the world works.” Haddon shows us a world of external control. We all are in the train of Busan.

4. Sometimes we are frightened by ourselves. If other curse us. We are the only one to accept it or not.

5. Parents teach us to be kind to others. But we have to make sure they are good to be treated. Sometimes we forget to show apologize with good attitude. We try to use “An eye for an eye” to deal with life. All of these fault will cause ourselves more troubles. Most of our time. We need to deal with incidents. How to make our life turns out more smooth, it all depends on our right attitude which comes from right thought.

6. Index finger of Buddha point to heaven and earth, means: In heaven and earth, I am the unique honorable one. I will enlighten and benefit all human beings through birth, aging, sickness and death. All living beings possess the human nature and one can control and create your own life. Once they get off anxiety and ignorance, they will become like Buddha. No matter all the piers fall down from every place, if we admit our fault and correct. We can build up our own pier up again.

7. Matton is a hard-line atheist, we can feel the story in his book shows the human-being is nothing but a dust. Come and go without any purpose.

8.      What you have done in your life, will be an Indiscriminate mark in our life. This will be our life work to get rid of it.

9. Life could be as heavy as the mountain, as light as the feather. Life could be gone with the wind. “Cowards die many times, but a brave man only dies once. “And as forever shining as the Cassiopeia. Clare gives it a try!

10. "How alike they are, she and her mother, these blank sheets on which men have written their stories, the white paper under the words, making all their achievements possible and contributing nothing to the meaning."
-- Mark Haddon from THE PIER FALLS

11. From the fall of your fear rise the hope. Linkin Park:”Who cares one more light goes out, I do” Life will forget today if we forgive yesterday. Chase here and now, Pain will be gone once we lost our soul and body.

The Pier Falls Discussion Suggested Questions by Helen

Summary:
In Bunny -The story is about Bunny, a helplessly obese man, and kicks off with a list of his preferred groceries. His mother cooks sardines for him, spends his disability allowances and tells him: “I’m going to save your life.” Bunny has no time for the concept of comfort eating: “He had not been comfortable for a very long time.” Haddon is excellent at evoking the depressing look of Bunny’s house: “The wallpaper must have gone up circa 1975, psychedelic bamboo shoots in red and orange, peeling a little at the edges.” A room as distempered as the earlier seaside balustrade and with people to match. The ending of this story again horrified me. A feel-bad factor rules.
The story-Wodwo (the wild man made familiar by Ted Hughes). This is masterly and unforgettable. It starts as a Christmas story – one guesses it will be about the combustible effect of Christmas on family. But this turns out to be a tame expectation. A stranger appears at the window with a gun – he is, possibly, a former psychiatric patient of the elderly doctor of the house. For the doctor’s son, Gavin, “an extravagantly gifted man” with a “monstrous ego”, life is about to unravel.
The stories are willed experiments, imagination’s darkest what-ifs. There is something bordering on wanton about them. It is no good hoping for a laugh or a positive tweak, let alone (with, possibly, one exception) a happy ending. Yet their execution is outstanding. And I recognise the paradox that Haddon, although ostensibly in control as the writer, is concerned with all that lies beyond control. People are at the mercy of each other. As Robyn, a character in Breathe, puts it: “You can’t just decide how you want things to be, Carol. That’s not how the world works.

Questions:

1. “Bunny” begins with a list: ‘He loved Mars bars and KitKats. He loved Double Deckers and Galaxy Caramels and Yorkies. He loved Reese’s Pieces and…” What was your favorite start to a story in this collection? What is the opener for your favorite short story of all time? What makes a great opening line?
All a good story must have goals, suspense, cause and effect, smoldering, accident. Haddon start from different cause and ends up with sad ending.

“Leah is a mercy angel or mercy killer” Clive lead us to think it over.

2. Christmas, bad weather and family: the story “Wodwo” claims “a family Christmas is a guaranteed generator of unease.” Do you agree?
Leo Tolstoy: Happy families are all alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own. They live happily, but behind the curtain, Gavin dislike to obey what his doctor father said. He just wanna fight against the power without any logic thought. It cause the danger. Helen mentioned that it’s easy for us in Taiwan to have a family gathering. It facilitate better the family atmosphere

3. In the final story, “The Weir,” the final word was “wasteland.” How do you feel this fits for the themes of the collection?
Did you feel optimism in the emotional power of The Pier Falls?

a depressed man who saves Kelly from drowning and who subsequently, in her own ways, saves himself. He saves a drowning woman who resist him to call ambulance. Since Kelly feels better, she runs out of the house. Later his separate wife stops by to get her belongings. His son Timothy also back cos the house fire.(p.319).

Then Kelly comes back to get her clothes while she went drowning. This time, Kelly comes in good time to cheer him up while his two dogs, Leo and Fran are dead. Nothing is wasted and the river will keep on flowing and there will be dandelions in spring and the buzzard will still be circling above the wasteland(p.321) Carol feel this is the most warm story in the Pier Falls.

Life could be as heavy as the mountain, as light as the feather. Life could be gone with the wind. “Cowards die many times, but a brave man only dies once. “And as forever shining as the Cassiopeia!

Matton is a hard-line atheist, we can feel the story in his book shows the human-being is nothing but a dust. Come and go without any purpose.

Helen’s Conclusion:

Dear All,

October's meeting review from Heln:

( In the Chapter of Wodwo, we changed a different type to talk about how do we celebrate on our Lunar New Year, or Christmas,)

Ladies enjoyed a lot on how we participate our Chinese lunar new year Eve. Florence got the best by her fully devoted to prepare a wonderful meal for children and grandchildren. Faye shared her experience on Christmas family reunion in America ...gifts preparation is the key and tough job to be done.
Thanks for Lydia been with us for book discussion .. Carol still acted as the best student to provide her witty thoughts.
Emma's new hair style gained widen attention.
Dear Clive..we appreciate your short but effective stay with us ..ha ha
Missing those who couldn't able to come..
Blessing to you all ..

Related Reading:

1. Mark Haddon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Haddon

2. The Pier Falls Review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/14/the-pier-falls-by-mark-haddon-review

3. The Pier Falls Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26109054-the-pier-falls

4. Gravity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmfWJhYranw

5. The Fall of Babylon the Great: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+18&version=NKJV

6. Internal control vs external control: https://yamol.tw/item_essay-%E5%9B%9B%E3%80%81%E4%BD%95%E8%AC%82%E5%85%A7%E6%8E%A7%28internal+control%29%E8%88%87%E5%A4%96%E6%8E%A7%28external+con..-3126.htm

7. Train to Busan: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B1%8D%E9%80%9F%E5%88%97%E8%BB%8A

8. The Pier Falls Review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/02/the-pier-falls-review-mark-haddon-virtuoso

9. Toba in Sumatra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Toba

10. The Pier Falls Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/books/newly-released-books-include-the-pier-falls-by-mark-haddon.html?mcubz=3

11. A shiung and Siddhartha